Procedures of SmartAlign
have been developed by Lewys Jones and Peter Nellist of University of Oxford
[1], and may be well applied for a scanning system, such as a scanning transmission
electron microscope (STEM), or scanning tunneling microscope (STM). In these
instruments, low frequency instabilities, such as stage drift and scan
distortion, change from image to image, and degrade resolution even when we add
these images after rigid alignment (simple overall translation alignment).
SmartAlign performs non-rigid alignment (pixel level alignment) of each image,
and thus restores resolution before degradation. Using the alignment
information the other data set obtained at the same time will be aligned. This
will be well applied for spectrum image (SI) data obtained with annular dark
field (ADF).

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